Why don't Americans trust experts anymore? Sean Illing interviewed Michael Lewis about this recently, but they somehow managed to miss the obvious. Here are three charts from the GSS survey:
There are blip and bloops, but around 1990 Republican trust in experts started a steady downward trend compared to Democrats. Republican distrust of the press is a long-told story. Distrust in medicine, which far predates COVID-19, likely has something to do with abortion, treatment of addiction as a disease, and perhaps increasing physician support of national health care. And distrust of the scientific community is pretty obviously because the scientific community keeps producing inconvenient conclusions.
I'm not claiming this is the whole story. But overall, distrust of experts is a Republican-driven phenomenon. You're missing a lot if you don't acknowledge that.
Anybody have any theories for why were Republicans were +15% (or so) over Democrats in trusting the scientific community during the 80's? Was it an anti-establishment side effect from historically-disadvantaged minorities and the punk/hippie/etc subcultures, maybe?
Wasn't that about the peak of the antinuclear movement on the left?
Also the organic/natural food movement, anti-pollution movements. I think strong government support of science by conservatives as a component of the Cold War may have been a huge factor. Once "Science" began to be seen as a liberal plot by the movement conservatives in the 1990s, the sides flipped.
Your linkage to the Cold War makes a good point. As a child of Sputnik-panicked America, I recall that Republicans and Democrats were united in pushing STEM education. The fall of the Soviet Union relieved pressure on the US for civil rights and science excellence.
Back then, Republicans were more educated than Democrats. They were the intellectual establishment. University faculties were full of Republicans. Scientists were often Republicans. Innovators in business were often Republicans. And it's not just the intellectual and business elite. Doctors were more conservative too.
And back then, the Democratic Party was full of blue-collar white racists still.
God, mention of Covid science really brings out the nuts, huh?
In any case, your point, Kevin, should not be controversial at all. It's dead obvious. This is a reminder that Michael Lewis isn't the great seer some people think he is.
First off, Vox article- LOL. Second Kevin's post- double LOL.
Just as a simple rejoinder- if you take the past 2 years of experts predictions and policy prescriptions related to COVID, if you think they did a good job then the problem is with your ability to objectively observe reality, not with people that doubt experts.
And just to ruffle feathers, it's pretty clear that politically active Democrats (like Kevin here) only believe the experts that confirm their preconceived notions about the world. When they see something they don't like, they keep poking around til they find what they want. That's also why various experts have a job- they keep confirming the world view of people like Kevin.
I don' think the "experts" got everything right about COVID. The notion that science gives perfect answers to how to react to a once in a century pandemic is a childish notion of how science works in the real world. OTOH, the folks who were pushing back the strongest mostly believed far more ridiculous things. Remember getting light into your body or injecting bleach or taking ivermectin or that if we just stopped testing the numbers would not be as bad.
As for your second point, you neglected to give a single example of Kevin only believing experts that confirm his preconceived notion. That doesn't mean Kevin doesn't get things wrong (who doesn't ?) but he usually tries pretty hard to present evidence for his points. Whereas, you haven't, you've just asserted.
"Whereas, you haven't, you've just asserted." Because it's a troll. It only leaves its droppings to get attention.
I, like many, have been following Covid "experts predictions" and "policy prescriptions" daily, if not hourly, for a couple of years now.
My recollections are:
1. The initial outbreak was known, not instantaneously, but at least as fast as say, EBOLA or some of the other threatening viruses.
2. The response of the US and Europe was exactly what you would predict (a) hope its going to be contained, (b) when it wasn't contained, implement legal restrictions only when it became so ridiculously obvious that, without a vaccine, not only would deaths rise but emergency rooms would be overwhelmed. Every expert I ever saw during this time period had one thing to say, and only one "this is going to be bad, its not just going away." Many politicians, who of course are not experts, issued public statements hoping it would go away.
3. Once vaccines became available, most first world countries did about the same job getting them out there, except the island nations like New Zealand, and except for China, who still, is working on a containment strategy. Its not to say the US is not working on containment, its more like the ability to shut things down in the US is nowhere near the ability in a totalitarian regime like China.
4. The vaccines worked. Every expert I ever heard said boosters may be needed, every expert I ever heard said (a) its unclear in the US if we could get to over 90% percent or whatever would be required, but (b) even if we did, its a world wide virus so new strains could come up. That's exactly what is happening.
5. Of course, every economy opened up to the maximum it could bear as soon as it could politically do so. This by the way, was almost always ahead of what experts said, the experts were always more cautious about activities and behaviours which were bound to increase spread.
I am sure I missed some conservative spin on this. What part of that is not "objectively observed reality?"
Its not a snarky question, I really would like to know, because you would think there would be, today, like 100% unanimity on the following point "thank God (or whoever you want to thank) we have all these experts, otherwise a couple more million would be dead, easy."
Conservatives are irrelevant. The fact there was no point to the restrictions in the first place and in the end, we're kept on a whole year+. It was unnecessary and did not work. A infectious disease expert should have known this and advised on restrictions pure wave. On, then off. Like you saw with omicron. New York Liberals like yourself need driven from Democratic party. You don't get it.
This creates another problem with the GSS polling model: what constitutes a "expert"?????
The vaccines "worked", yes, but not as advertised.
We were told they would stop us from getting covid. This turned out to be a blatant lie, and the people responsible have yet to be held to account for this.
The vaccines do save lives, yes. But again, that was not what was sold to us. Another example of scientists failing the public, and thus another reason why people aren't trusting scientists as much.
OK, not that I am going to get a response, but I don't remember a single story on the vaccines, as developed, which ever said, or even implied, that a vaccine would be 100% effective in making the user have symptomless covid.
The vaccines have probably stopped like a billion people from "getting covid" and have worked exactly, I mean, exactly, as every story said they would.
So can you point to one of these "blatant lies" from an expert? I am sure some politician blew some BS, but that's not the issue of this thread.
Who said that? How was that supposed to work, anyway? Raise an impenetrable shield around you like on Star Trekl? If you misunderstood what the vaccine was designed to do that is your own fault.
Also, who do you want to be held responsible, and what does hold responsible mean to you? Are you one of those KY lawmakers who want to hang Fauci? Or are you one of the ones who want him to face a firing squad? And why Fauci? You never hear of the CEO of Moderna being threatened with hanging.
I don't get it. Scientists don't know how a vaccine will perform til it's tried out. On each new variant, no less. Getting it wrong is not a "lie" let alone a "blatant lie". And people are turning against scientists because of this, even though, oh yeah, they do "save lives"? I must be missing something, or are you just a righty? That would explain why your post sounds like idiocy. But by all means correct me if I'm wrong.
"We were told they would stop us from getting covid. This turned out to be a blatant lie, and the people responsible have yet to be held to account for this"
That's not what a "lie" is (let along a "blatant" one)--it's barely what a "mistake" is. Jesus, do you think that public health experts have foreknowledge of the future, and that anytime they get something wrong, it's a malicious falsehood?
The initial efficacy rate for the mRNA vaccines was based on the original variant. They turned out not to prevent getting infected with later variants, but they still greatly reduced the seriousness of the infections and reduced the death rate. This did not involve a "blatant lie". These vaccines were a new thing, at least on a large scale, so it was and is unreasonable to expect anybody to get everything perfect. Countries which kept infections down until nearly everyone was vaccinated, like Australia and South Korea, have had a great increase in infections after they opened up but death rates are much lower. People who resisted vaccination on the supposed grounds that the science was unproven just got it wrong and in consequence a lot of them are dead. Of course most of the resisters were actually motivated by political partisanship or other group affinities.
85% of South Koreans were vaccinated by November 2021 before their Omicron wave hit and Covid deaths were the highest ever there, reaching 5 times as many deaths per day as during the Delta wave in the fall of 2021.
"We were told they would stop us from getting covid."
Do you have a link to any refereed paper that stated that vaccines would prevent vaccinated people from getting COVID-19? If so, please post, because I'm a scientist and a medical school professor who is in the Moderna phase III trial, and I missed those papers.
Thank you for your service! I've received the phizer and not the moderna, but nonetheless I'm grateful for (and trusting of) the scientific expertise of you folks.
In early April of 2021, The New York Times quoted C.D.C. head Rochelle Walensky. The sub-headline was: "Researchers pushed back after the C.D.C. director asserted that vaccinated people “do not carry the virus.”
Sorry, that's not a refereed paper stating that vaccinated people would not get COVID. It's a quote in a newspaper report. Can you spot the difference?
The topic is trust in experts. Where did the head of the CDC get her misinformation from?
Obviously not from the refereed literature.
The entire sentence was “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” It was spoken during an interview, so was not a scripted statement; and of course the words ‘today’ and ‘suggests’ mark it as tentative. Within three days, the CDC issued a correction (NYT April 2, 2021). Scientists are not infallible, but science is self-correcting, as in this instance.
No, we were never told by experts that the vaccines would be 100% effective, that is you lying. I remember this very clearly, because, while the vaccines were in development, I researched the efficacy of influenza vaccines on the CDC website, which has excellent data, gathered by experts. Flu vaccine varies in efficacy from year to year, as the experts attempt to predict the evolution of the known strains of the virus. Sometimes the efficacy is no better than 50%, sometimes much better. Sometimes the virologists' predictions are more accurate than others. When data on the Covid-19 vaccine trials was published, experts were very excited that the efficacy (against the then-most-prevalent strain) was above 90%, as good as the best influenza vaccines. Since that time, the virus has mutated a number of times, and the vaccines have been somewhat less effective against some of the variants. The consensus of virologists and infectious-disease specialists was and is that the vaccines have been very effective; none however claimed perfection.
The said over 90% effective, which was shown to be false. The CDC has been deceitful throughout the pandemic including vaccination data. Fortunately Israel has been transparent and the UK was transparent until recently.
Let’s see - I post using my own name, and cite sources. You post using a pseudonym, and never cite a source. Who is more likely to be the one pulling stuff out of his ass?
"The [sic] said over 90% effective"
Over 90% effective at what? The vaccines have been about 90% effective at keeping people out of hospitals and morgues, compared to unvaccinated people.
We were told they would stop us from getting covid.
Those who didn't read might have been.
There was ample coverage surrounding the clinical trials to the effect that A) they stopped infection in some cases (which AFAIK is still true, even with Omicron) and B) they were highly effective at keeping symptoms non life-threatening. Which is definitely still true.
Exactly. The data show that the vaccines make symptoms milder on average, and keep people out of the hospital and morgue better than being unvaccinated.
Lam, I for one would like an enumeration of places experts got it wrong, I'm coming up blank.
I have been double vaxxed and double boosted. Republicans said I would magnetic, controlled by nanobots through the 5g network and dead within months. Yet here I am alive, unable to attract magnetic objects let alone nonmagnetic stainless steel silverware or brass keys, with no 5g connectivity.
OMG, you're right! I'm not magnetic either!
And spoons never stick to me. I should go around poking and pawing conservatives to show them how I don't stick. They need to know.
Also, radio reception from my dental implants never improved.
So, complainers, if you had known that the vaccines couldn’t protect you 100% from getting infected at all, but only greatly reduce your chances of getting extremely sick and dying, what would you have done differently? Would you not have bothered getting the shots at all, because they were only good, not perfect?
I think these stats and charts indicate more about who is now a Republican than it does about any change in people trusting in science and experts. The Republican Party has morphed from a button-downed, somewhat conservative, pro-business, pro-low tax party into one that believes in injecting yourself with bleach. Those bleachers used to be spread out among the parties more, but the Internet and social media have allowed them to find each other and gather together online where they also get recruited by Republicans. Democrats aren't actively recruiting kooks.
It doesn't help that when a kook spouts his nonsense on social media, he gets banned instead of argued with. This causes two things to occur:
1) He finds and joins fringe social media, which serves as an echo chamber to his beliefs. Since conservatives have been exiled to these spaces, his views change to become more like those around him.
2) He goes to vote, and remembers what the liberals have done to him, and thus pulls the lever for Trump as a gigantic F.U. to all liberals.
I particularly like it when they refuse vaccination as a gigantic F.U. to all liberals. Not happening fast enough.
Has arguing with one of these people ever done a bit of good?
First of all, it's very hard to argue with kooks because fundamental facts and understanding about how things work are not shared. 2 + 2 = 4 has to be a shared understanding. I don't have that strong a feeling about what private companies decide to do about their platforms but if you are a kook who has been banned from one platform you can find another to spread your kookery from. If that's his or her grievance, that what liberals have done to him is forced him to go to another platform, and this is what causes him or her to vote GOP, then I think that was foreordained long before getting kicked off a platform. Your point about kooks pulling the lever for Trump and other GOP cultists would seem to support Kevin's points.
"It doesn't help that when a kook spouts his nonsense on social media, he gets banned instead of argued with"
Yes, yes, kooks and nonsense ought to be normalized instead of ostracized. That's the BEST way to address nonsense kookery. That way, instead of having to go find some fringe social media to serve as an echo chamber, the general discourse can confirm the kook's weirdo beliefs.
It's just like how if somebody went to a Catholic mass and demanded to debate the priest on the virtues of Zeus and Shiva, quietly asking the troll to leave would be counterproductive.
Actually, in my late uncle's case folks did just that! He was a professor of religion who taught at West Point as a guest lecturer and was tenured at a small Catholic College north of NYC.
Ha! That's hilarious--would have been fun to be in the room at the time.
The leaders of the Republican Party don’t believe in injecting bleach into their bodies, they just believe in saying whatever it takes to get people stupid enough to inject bleach into their bodies to vote for them.
Hah! Exactly!
In today's world, one is expected to be somewhat of an expert to just get by. Think taxes, mortgages, medication regimes, scheduling, education goals, opinion on culture, environment, and history, etc.
This requires effort. Real effort. Experts seem to effortlessly fire salvo after salvo after salvo into our midst. Retreat, ignore, and find new wells to draw water from or engage. Engage with dire, complicated, and existential matters.
Meanwhile, Giuliani sings Bad to the Bone in front of millions.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is true. The modern world requires a staggering amount of knowledge and expertise to navigate effectively. Most people don't have the background/education/cultural or social capital to do that effectively. Consequently they constantly feel like they're being set up or taken advantage of, or are the victims of incruitable conspiracies that they *can* somehow wrap their heads around. Carl Sagan, iirc, predicted this problem a number of years ago -- that as the world grows more technologically complex, the fewer people will really understand how it works, leading to widespread alienation and the erosion of democracy as populists and demagogues emerge to tell them it's not them, it's the "system" (or "swamp" or whatever) that's at fault and they can fix it. He was right.
Thank you for adding Carl's thoughts (a personal hero). It's the continued "gamification of the world." For what? A little bit of money? Fame? A rush to escape one's own fears? Prolly.
But we ignore our world, and continue to complicate it unnecessarily, at our peril.
There is no reference to God or to religion at all.. Perhaps we should ban Carl Sagan from our textbooks and classes too. Do we want our children to be led astray by godless scientists like this ? What kind of country would we become ?
Saints? Sinners? Kings? All divinely inspired.
This is an example of the sort of overreach I mentioned in my long post below.
Sagan as astronomer is fine. I have a physics degree and a great love for astrophysics. But most of this is opinion!
Astronomy can tell us that the earth is small, the universe is big, and we know of no life elsewhere. It cannot tell us that therefore we need to treat each other a certain way, treat the earth a certain way.
I happen to agree with most of what Sagan is saying. But his opinions only carry weight as the opinions of a human, about the human condition, they don't gain extra value and extra credibility because he happens to be an astronomer as opposed to an electrical engineer, or a plumber, or a hair dresser.
And anyone demanding a particular political or social program "because Astronomy says so" is precisely the reason why those who reject the program being demanded are, more or less, also forced to reject Astronomy.
I've read a lot of Sagan's words and I never got that he was speaking authoritatively because of Astronomy but because Astronomy had made him reflect, put him in his place so to speak. That Astronomy humbled him and changed his perspective. I read those words in my formative years and I felt wonder, awe, and finally I realized how small I really am. I changed my perspective too.
Which is _exactly_ why I advocate loudly and often for what some consider a drastic change in High School curricula(?) Basic logic and reasoning, including classes in rhetoric and how to spot the fallacy. Basic statistics. I know, I know, many schools offer those classes. I'm saying they should be credit requirements in order to graduate.
TL;DR: The skills needed for a firehose of incoming information are vastly different from the skills needed for information scarcity.
Thinking about my high school math classes, in the 70s, I realized it seemed to me that the emphasis was always on getting the right answer, as opposed to the method of getting the right answer. Though the method is the whole thing in math, it seems to me, in my recollection, the emphasis on the outcome, not the journey, where the journey should have been the significant part and the outcome nearly incidental, in teaching it.
I'm kind of wondering if the some of the noise before 1990 is the fall of the Fairness Doctrine and Rush et all finding their market starting in 1988.
This is true too. The rise of Fox News and Rush and the others on late-night radio was a big factor in the erosion of trust. I had to do a lot of late-night driving back in the '80s and '90s and I listened to some of the stuff on the radio just to see what it was about, knowing that all the truckers were listening in too. I knew back then it wasn't going to lead to anything good. But, the Internet allowed all these kooks to find each other in online spaces and get together in places where Republicans could recruit them, leading to today's party of nonsense.
Maybe, but your retarded in the first place. My guess this is the decline of the second wave boomers. Lead poisoning has its calamity.
It's ok to question self serving "elites". But when you become one yourself essentially, this is what the Kevin Drum's of the world miss
When you're sober come back to us with a thought that is understandable.
I am also sober. It's you who aren't
How come the Swede employs better English than you do?
its antisemitism, obsession with oddball phrasing about economics, and insistence on "dialectics" make me think it could be a badly-performing eastern european troll farm account.
English isn't the biggest of its problems, but it's not the least, either.
Naw, he's a home-grown nut; been hanging around for years under various names, spewing vile racism, crackpot economics, and wacko conspiracy theories.
that's one of my other hypotheses! I guess this country is a pretty big place, and there are all sorts of nutters out there. You're probably right--a troll farm would have an incentive on some level to do quality control, and it's not apparent that that's happening with "spades" here.
“I am also sober, it’s you who are not” he slurred as he slid from the bar stool onto the floor.
Please don't feed the racist, anti-semitic semi-literate troll.
The problem with the GSS survey's like this is what they define "Republican and Democrat" is misleading . My guess neither for a lot of suspicious people. This would heavily change the graph.
The answers to the GSS survey are themselves probably partly a result of political polarization, especially in the difference between the latest survey and the previous one. That is, for Republicans part of their attitude is due to Republican and corporate propaganda denigrating science, but part of it is just due to them feeling compelled to take the rightist side on any polarized matter. This may be even more important for Democrats - why should their trust in science increase so much since 2016? Link to the GSS survey:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/trust-science-becoming-more-polarized-survey-finds
There is probably a similar effect in survey results on immigration. As Trump made hating immigrants the basis of his appeal to voters, Democrats' response that immigration is a good thing for the country increased greatly.
For conservatives this has to do with their foundational anxiety issue, where they want security, assurance and absolutes in all things. They want a rule book they can refer to and apply in every circumstance.
Expertise is something that has to be kept up to date or it's no longer expertise, it's physical brutality. Because they reject something that may have to be qualified or fundamentally reconsidered as circumstances and advances require they privilege anything with a known and obvious result they can appeal to which, in the face of expertise, can only be outright, arbitrary dismissal which, in public matters, can only be achieved by force, and that's why they will say torture works.
Interesting that the decline in respect for expertise among Republicans occurred along with the rise in their respect for QAnon, Pizzagate and other laughable conspiracy theories.
No it didn't. AGW is the biggest reason, well before the cons of the Putin era.
I'm left with questions. For example: Do Republicans take their cars to mechanics when they break down, or do they look for people with strong opinions about cars? Do they avoid GPS -- which is pretty darn sciencey? What about the sports section of the {shudder} newspaper, with its scores and stats?
There's lots of snakeoil for sale on car forums and YouTube too, and if you get into some threads you'll discover they are certainly not liberal Democrats. I suspect GPS is sort of like gravity--you don't have to believe in it for it to work. Have you followed any sports threads on Twitter? There isn't a game that doesn't feature someone ranting about how the refs are in on the con or the balls are deflated or overinflated. So, short answer is yes, Republicans are more gullible to cons, and they tend to believe in their gut more than their brains. There are studies on this: https://news.osu.edu/conservatives-more-susceptible-to-believing-falsehoods/
Conservatives, If this is wrong I don't ever want to be right because then I'd be just another idiot.
Reagan was able to get a scientist to say we didn't have to worry about global warming even though two scientific panels, at least one commissioned by Reagan said it was a serious problem. So science still ok.
Gore went all "inconvenient truth" in the later 90's, but fossil fuel companies had their naysayer scientists out in force, so science still ok, but starting to get worrisome.
After 2000, wildfires, floods, king tides, oh my.... I'm not going to believe my lyin' eyes, and science sounds partisan. Rolling coal!!!
Now...I don't need no stinkin' mask!
So, to me the biggest actor trying to discredit scientists is the fossil fuel industry. They have lots of cash, and lots of motive to discredit science. As it turns out, the political group they had the best fit with was Republicans, so that's who they allied with. In some cases, such as the Koch brothers, it's the same people.
I think the discrediting of science really starts there. These guys have a huge bag of tricks, such as planting stories, "letters to the editor", talk shows. And now Facebook. In addition to the frontal assaults.
Social conservatives have always questioned expertise in any matter that contradicted their gut feeling in any matter, but they were ok with science when they could think of it as primarily engineering due to the massive, physically imposing, reconstruction of life through the 20th century, but when that got old and familiar, and detailed results of the softer sciences began influencing social policy, their gut feeling reasserted itself.
If it isn't their idea, they're against it.
Are these charts percentage differences or percentage point differences? If say 60% of Democrats trusted something and 54% of Republicans would that be a -6% on the chart or a -10%?
Also, these are relative figures, so how have the Democratic absolute figures changed over time? Are these deltas all GOP trust percentages dropping or does some come from Democratic percentages increasing?
I think conservatives have a lot more propaganda in their lives. Anti science is a great propaganda tool that triggers their grievance response.
"Here are three charts from the GSS survey"
Of course that would require me to trust the GSS survey...
And (non-sarcastically) that's a bridge too far. The GSS survey is real, serious garbage, and the people behind it just don't care. You can explain to them why it's garbage till you're blue in the face, nothing will change. They're EXACTLY the sort of moronic moron who goes into Social Science already certain they know all the answers and convinced that the fact they can write a three-liner in R means they're a credentialed expert on society, and you are not.
On a different topic, the distrust in experts is, to at least some extent, the fault of (some of) the experts themselves.
An on-going pattern we have seen in science, since about the midst of the 20th C is
- scientist is expert in some scientific field (sure, no arguments)
- scientist makes claim about connection between scientific field and the rest of life (hmm, maybe, maybe not)
- scientist (or others who find it useful to do so) insist that political/social decisions tangentially related to the science are non-political, and others opinions don't matter "because science".
So, for example
- a scientist will have detailed knowledge of the covid virus, less detailed knowledge of covid the disease, even less detailed knowledge of epidemiology and mitigations. And yet this is converted into supposedly inarguable claims about POLITICAL decisions like what risk/cost tradeoffs should be made by society.
- a scientist will have detailed knowledge about nuclear physics, less detailed knowledge of the effects of nuclear weapons, substantially guess-work opinions about how nuclear weapons might be used in a real conflict.
And yet this is converted in supposedly inarguable claims about POLITICAL decisions like what risk/cost tradeoffs should be made by society.
- a scientist will have detailed knowledge about atmospheric physics, less detailed knowledge of the resulting climate change, substantially guess-work opinions about how this will translate into economic and political effects.
And yet this is converted in supposedly inarguable claims about POLITICAL decisions like what risk/cost tradeoffs should be made by society.
This is coupled with constant simplifications by at least those conveying the science on the grounds that "the details will just confuse people". Except that what REALLY happens -- we have seen this repeatedly -- is that there's a certain class of people who can spot a logical inconsistency a mile away. They WILL detect the inconsistencies in the publicly simplified argument, they WILL publicize them, and the bulk public (the same one who wouldn't have cared less about the complexities) CAN understand the (true!) claim that they are in essence being lied to by people who claim to be experts.
(For example: does global warming exacerbate storms? Well common sense might say "of course" but the historical record shows that in fact the stormiest periods of earth history [as measured by things like how far sand grains travelled] have occurred during the colder periods of earth's history. How do we reconcile these? Earth science, as far as I know, doesn't yet have an answer.
But in the public discussion of climate change have you ever heard about this?
That sort of "hide the details that don't fit the narrative" is exactly what leads to conspiracy theories.)
So we have a one-two punch
- stupid stupid behavior that makes people feel like they are living in a conspiracy theory
- an arrogance that credentials in one area transfer to opinions about what to do that cannot be argued with in some other area. I, a virologist, can tell you that, best guess, if we engage in strategy X m people will die, and in strategy Y n people will die. But that doesn't make MY opinion that it's better to let m people die (with this set of side effects for the economy, education, inequality, blah blah) than n people dies (with this different set of side effects) any more important than yours or an economist's or the voting public as a whole.
This is even apart from a whole bunch of pseudo-scientific fields like Education or Criminology where having a credential means fsck-all, in that it doesn't make you any more able to predict anything than a random person on the street; all it means is you have studied the appropriate theology manuals and know the words of the catechism.
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